Housing: Look First At Councils

Michael Koziol has called out both Leichhardt Council and its minority of nay-saying residents in a long overdue Sydney Morning Herald article. God knows how the only paying reader of the SMH will take this:

Sydney’s housing crisis is substantially the fault of “narrow-minded, self-interested individuals who oppose the building of any new homes in their suburbs,” says a recent McKell Institute report. Bingo. But it’s not just your NIMBY neighbours blocking the road: it’s local government, too.

What is so galling about the Leichhardt Counci’s longstanding attempt to lock up the Inner West (as if it is classical Rome) is that it has been done by people ostensibly concerned about students, the poor and the homeless.

Yet Green policies that reduce housing supply are the root cause of unaffordable inner city rents and rising house prices.

What we actually have is a bunch of middle class wankers using a combination of planning, heritage and environmental laws to tell the young and the disadvantaged “Piss off, I’ve got mine”.

The Greens’ approach to urban consolidation is puzzling: they oppose it despite high-density being the most environmentally sustainable form of living we have besides farmland subsistence. The result of their intransigence is even more urban sprawl, the kind that produces McMansions and 4WDs to traipse the motorways twice each day.

They generously welcome migrants and refugees on one hand, but resist policies that would provide affordable accommodation for them on the other.

I am unabashedly in favour of higher density housing in the Inner West. Let’s be clear here: my views are, sadly, not those of any political party (an obligatory rider, unfortunately).

Increasing density close to the CBD is a major equity issue that should be up front for the ‘progressive Left’: in modern cities geographic privilege can be as important as financial. Artificially-reduced densities support house prices that exclude outsiders. And increased density has energy, environmental, transport and economic advantages.

It is absurd that 3-5 km from the centre of Australia’s most global city we can have a council that acts as if it’s a tiny town in rural Devon. And that we have some residents who expect the sort of privacy and silence they enjoyed as they grew up in monied outer suburbia or on our leafy north shore.

It’s the inner city, stupid. It’s noisy. It lacks privacy. If you want quiet and the ability to sunbake nude in your garden, buy a farm. Or move to St Ives. Not that I’d recommend either.

There are trade offs to living so close to a major city centre. But it is no surprise that those behind Green policies are unwilling to face the consequences of their choices, or make the trade offs their choices imply. That defines the Green mindset.

For twenty years I have watched as people have moved into the area and then whinged about noise. As if it were unforeseen there might be noise moving next door to a nightclub – which was subsequently shut down (actual case). Or that living on a main street above shops might be, well, a bit loud (trading restrictions applied). Equally absurd expectations on privacy restrict changes to people’s homes and backyards.

There is ample opportunity to allow increased floor space in existing homes, and to allow higher density housing in key corridors. And without the legalised blackmail of voluntary planning agreements with developers, which are just another in a long line of discretionary charges that bid up the cost of inner city housing.

Thanks to Hall Greenland’s input into the 2000 LEP (and the subsequent actions of a certain Legal operative) Leichhardt has highly restrictive Floor-Space Ratios which allow council an almost arbitrary power to disapprove development applications. They are applied inconsistently, waived frequently, but can always be relied on to ensure Council can stop whatever they feel like. Under Leichhardt’s perversion they have become a de facto density control rather than a bulk and scale control.

Too often I’ve seen families forced to leave the Inner West because of rigid planning views on an extra bedroom, or heritage restrictions on housing changes, or arbitrary rejection of a dormer window.

Too often I’ve seen thousands in extra costs imposed on residents and businesses to deliver reports which were ignored, or to pay totally unnecessary court costs.

And while all reports from inner west architects suggest the misuse and misapplication of heritage orders has improved, for years it was a weapon to lock out any home improvements or expansions. Can you imagine being forced to maintain a wood cottage on a double block because it had 13 wood slats from the 1800s?

Given the longstanding Green agenda to fix or reduce population densities in the Inner West, it’s time they owned up to the fact that they are the cause of high rents, they are the cause of gentrification, and that they speak for the financially and geographically privileged.

The Inner West isn’t a retirement home for superannuated 70s activists. It’s a lively and dynamic area that can and should provide housing opportunities for all income levels without the foolishness of government subsidy or Council housing. All it takes is a Council that wants to make that happen.

All sense of balance in the heritage argument is gone. It has reached that point where where its concepts and application, and the exercise of power associated with it, have well exceeded usefulness or reason.
Our built environment isn't an opportunity for monomaniacs to create a frozen theme park corresponding to their passions, funded by the taxes of people who share neither the location nor the ideology behind it.

James, you write that “artificially-reduced densities support house prices that exclude outsiders.” Look, I don’t like the Greens any more than you do, and much of what that Council does is daft, BUT why shouldn’t people fight using any means necessary to protect the value of their largest assets? To put it another way, if developers can lobby to protect or increase their wealth, why shouldn’t individual householders? When we talk about “equity”, we’re talking about picking constituency A’s pocket to reward constituency B.

PWAF,
Missed the point a little. I don’t argue that people shouldn’t fight to protect their property interests, if that’s what they want to do. Just don’t pretend that that private interest is the public interest. Don’t pretend that you (ie Greens) are concerned about affordability when it’s your policies creating the problem. Don’t pretend that you’re doing anything other supporting asset-holding insiders in locking out others from sharing your geographic privilege.

In many ways this is a great example of the mistaken view that the aggregation of private subjective interests is the equivalent of the public interest. Well, in this case it isn’t.

There’s a conceptual similarity between this and unions driving pay and conditions that reduce employment for those outside the system. Exactly the same concept of insiders protecting what they’ve got to the detriment of the broader public interest.

I still buy the paper SHM everyday. There are still a few us supporting local renewable resource industries rather than Chinese sweatshops shipping scarce minerals mined in slave-labor conditions in Africa to produce the latest electronic gadgets discarded into landfill and poisoning tree-frogs after 6 month use, but admittedly I am in a distinct minority.

What did I think of the article? I was surprised, but I did allow myself a wry smile. Mostly at the thought of the ex-radical students, now aging and hugely wealthy baby boomers sitting pretty with housing assets worth a cool $1.8mil in Rozelle, choking with indignation at such views somehow sneaking into â€œtheirâ€ newspaper. The one part owned by Gina Rhinehart. In an article written by… (wait for it!) a young radical student!

Its a funny old world.

***

An aside James, just while you have urban consolidation and Leichhardt Council in your sites… I donâ€™t know if you receive their press releases, but today one lobbed its way past me like a bomb today.

It was called : â€œLeichhardt Council rejects State Government plan to turn Parramatta Road into a ghost town.â€

Errr… what plan? I immediately thought…

Of course, if you read SMH (yesterday and today â€“ paper of iPad versions) and the two reports of which Mayor Porteousâ€™ ludicrously hyperbolic presser was based, you will know â€“ there is no â€œplanâ€ to do anything. None whatsoever, merely SMH speculation about what Infrastructure NSW (a body which itself has NO statuary planning powers â€“ NONE whatsoever) MIGHT recommend for consideration on Parramatta Rd.

My thoughts were with the Mayorâ€™s hapless press officer, who no doubt had to extend his 35hr nine day fortnight for several minutes to get 250 words written and approved within a recklessly brisk 2-day time-frame. If you work for Leichhardt Council, you park your brain in a basket.

Well said, although I’d like to offer a small caveat to one of the statements:

> Let’s be clear here: my views are, sadly, not those of any political
> party (an obligatory rider, unfortunately).

No established party, perhaps, but there’s a few of the much maligned micro-parties floating around who feel exactly the same way about the links between density on the one hand, and equity and environmentalism on the other.

The scope of the latter is such that we won’t be taking it to state or local elections, but we’re in the process of developing more ideas on seriously increasing density in Sydney, to campaign on next March.